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Two guys sitting in a bar having a great time and very much intoxicated, they amusingly mimic a girl singing on stage. They are very humored by this form of entertainment while completely suspended from sensibility. Next thing they know one of them is pinned to the ground and gets the beating of his life! His best friend, John Lennon, tries to defend him the best as he could and even gets his wrist broken in the process. Bludgeoned and almost covered in blood, Stuart Sutcliffe gets kicked in the head extremely hard, which many believed is what triggered the brain hemorrhage that lead to his death in 1962. The Beatles will never be the same again.

Born on the 23rd of June, 1940, Stuart Ferguson Victor Sutcliffe was a quiet, good looking, but very shy lad. He had personal charisma and looks comparable to James Dean. He would often reserve away from the female gender, but still would not have any trouble having them as companions. His passion for art was not just a hobby but more of a way of life. Every stroke of paint that he put onto a canvass was an expression of a different aspect of himself. By the age of 19, he was already considered as one of the most promising and talented students at the Liverpool College of Arts. While Sutcliffe was a gifted artist, he also had an interest with music; this was mainly influenced by his friendship with John Lennon. Stu would hang around with John’s group during gigs and rehearsals while doing his work. This almost brought a concern to his fellow artists that he might abandon his first love, painting. But nevertheless, he was still just as interested in art as he always had been.

As Stu and John’s college years progressed, they developed a remarkable friendship that would be envied almost by everyone around at that time (who wouldn’t!) they would rely on each other for anything anytime. Stu would influence John to express his creative side while John on the other hand, would tell Stu to relax a bit more and teach him how to connect with others. Both of them cherished this and became the best of friends. As Stuart further expounded his skills for art he decided to enter some of his paintings for the John Moore exhibition which was regarded as one of the best around for its type. John(Lennon) was so excited for Stu that he even brought his Aunt Mimi to the exhibit to flaunt his best friend’s work. This also caught the attention of the host (John Moore) and even bought one of Stu’s paintings for an unheard sum of 65 pounds! Having received this large sum of money, Stu didn’t exactly knew what to do with it. Sure he had a few debts here and there or maybe he should buy more painting materials to further support his craft, but instead John convinced him to buy a bass guitar (Hofner President) and join his group, Johnny & the Moondogs. Although Stu didn’t really know how to play and had to turn down John a couple of times, he finally decided to give it a go and this would turn out to be one of the most important decisions that he would make in his life. Never mind that he couldn’t play he would eventually pick it up by self-teaching and “with a little help from his friends.”

Years later George (Harrison) would recall in one interview: “Stu had no idea how to play, we all showed him what we could but he really picked it up by coming around with us and playing onstage.” Although it became clear to everyone including John, that Stuart would never be as excellent a musician as he was a brilliant artist. The group would turn his amp off whenever he couldn’t follow a song or was having a difficult time finishing it. Stu on the other hand, would rather turn his back to the crowd during live gigs for them not to notice his flaw.

However because of this, he was able to embody that distinctive sense of style and mystery to the band’s appearance. Shortly after a few gigs in their local area, the boys got an invitation to play in a club somewhere in Hamburg. But before flying-off, they had to undergo a series of modifications of their band’s name; from Johnny & the Moondogs, to the Silver Beetles, until finally Stu came up with just “The Beetles.” Stuart was thinking of a name that would resemble Buddy Holly & the Cricketts since John and Paul (McCartney) were into them at that time.

Later the second “e” was dropped and instead was replaced by an “a” since John had specified that “we’re a beat group.”

Meanwhile back in Hamburg, a couple were having a lover’s quarrel when the guy, Klaus Voorman (who later went on to design the cover of Revolver) decided to walk out and just wander the streets of Hamburg for some fresh air until he found himself walking into a club and heard a performance by a group of musicians from Liverpool. He was also so enthralled by this and ran back to his (then) lover, Astrid Kircherr, to tell her about them. They began to talk to these boys after the performance and right away there was an immediate connection between Stuart and Astrid. Even though there was a huge communication gap, the two fell in love instantly with each other.

OFFF Cincinnati is an event for the entire creative community, bringing artists and designers from around the world to share their work and inspiration with you! What differentiates OFFF from other conferences is the passion and diversity of techniques that the presenters share, from analog and handcraft to cutting edge digital processes. Because of last year’s sold-out success, we’ve moved the conference to a bigger venue–theAronoff Center.

Once again, OFFF Cincinnati features some of the world’s biggest names and brightest minds exploring design and technology today, including coders, illustrators, motion graphic designers and more.

According to Google’s new n-gram tool, when researching history, words count.

Literally.

By analyzing over 500 billion words from 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish, the n-gram tool allows users to track the usage of words from 1500AD onwards. The implications of this tool in terms of historical and cultural research are just beginning to come to light. In the article “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Jean-Baptiste Michel and his fellow researchers suggest that Google’s n-gram can be used to track the emergence of diseases, state censorship and the relative “celebrity” of a given person.

There is no doubt that the n-gram is, and will continue to be, an extremely useful tool in historical inquiry. However, there are some limitations that need to be addressed.

Firstly, the Google n-gram is limited in regards to language. Most of the collected works are written in English. Although this is helpful for me (an Anglophone student from Canada), some of the world’s most spoken languages, like Arabic and Hindi, are not even present in the database.

Furthermore, as Jean-Baptiste Michel notes, the Google n-gram tool simply measures the frequency of words within books, and books alone. Therefore, other publications like newspapers, and academic journal articles are marginalized from each search. The impact of this becomes quite clear when you compare n-gram searches on Google, and an n-gram search that browses through local newspaper clippings like the site, Mining the Dispatch. On Mining the Dispatch, users are able to see the relative frequency of fugitive slave ads that made it into the local Richmond newspaper during the Civil War. Because of its larger scope, and inability to browse through newspapers, this kind of historical deduction cannot be made through Google’s n-gram.

There is no doubt that the n-gram is, and will continue to be, an extremely useful tool in historical inquiry. However, there are some limitations that need to be addressed.

Firstly, the Google n-gram is limited in regards to language. Most of the collected works are written in English. Although this is helpful for me (an Anglophone student from Canada), some of the world’s most spoken languages, like Arabic and Hindi, are not even present in the database

I think it’s also important to note that language, although an important (and often forgotten) indication of culture is certainly not the only one. As historians know, geography, religion and class, all play a critical role in shaping the thoughts, actions and mindsets of a given people. Language is only one small piece of what makes us who we are.

Indeed, Canada, the United States, and the UK, may all be English speaking nations, but we have very different cultures. Just to prove this point, I decided to gauge the relative frequencies of three major sports: baseball, hockey, and football. From 1900-2008, the frequency of hockey was dismal compared to football and baseball. However, this was a search that took into account all English books written during the designated period. I imagine if I were to search a corpus containing only Canadian books, hockey would be mentioned far more frequently..

But more than that, words themselves are limited.

Think about Twitter. Depending on the words we choose to use in our hashtags, our statuses are more searchable. Similarly, if we tweet about a topic that’s trending, what we say is viewed by a larger audience. But what if we don’t use the right words to categorize what we’re saying? What if we type in an extra “s” or add an apostrophe where it doesn’t belong? But more pertinent than that, what if we say one thing, and mean another?

My previous example with sports provides an interesting example. In English, the word “football” can either mean soccer, or American football. In my search, this discrepancy wasn’t accounted for. Therefore, any mention of the word “football,” whether that book was actually talking about soccer or American football, was nonetheless counted. And therein lies another problem with Google’s n-gram: the tool gives us no sense of context.

And for the historian, context is king.

An old Chinese proverb claims that, “If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.”

After playing around with the Google n-gram, and uncovering its uses, I think this is extremely accurate. However, words are only one investigative tool in the proverbial historical tool-belt that can be used to understand history and culture.

MUHAMMAD ALI IN ACTION SERIES“Float like a butterfly sting like a bee” eyes of an eagle, stomach of steel. His humanitarianism, his dedication to Allah, his charisma, his confidence, his beauty, his will to win (even when being booed), and of course, his hometown, are all reason’s I have chosen Muhammad Ali as my subject for a series of drawings.

I became interested in boxing after watching an HBO special profiling the lives of two boxers about ready to fight each other. There is an extreme passion, dedication, and discipline to prepare the body for the best physical condition it can be in, so as to beat and not be beaten. The possible physical damage a boxer puts his body through is extreme. As a figurative artist I find it absolutely amazing what these bodies endure and how they recover to preform again and again.

One thing that struck me as I watched the boxers fight in slow motion was how graceful the bodies looked as they danced together. Dancing to find the right opportunity to make a swing most effective. It is a perfect combination of violence and beauty, coming together to see who is stronger, who is faster, and who will ultimately win the match. Finding a series of Ali’s fights on DVD, gave me a chance to watch him in action, frame by frame. I selected the images I found most compelling and captured the power of his and his opponent’s bodies in water-soluble crayon, pen, charcoal, and soft pastels. I’ve been involved with this project for more than a year and continue to be inspired by Ali as a subject.

In his poetry, Yusef Komunyakaa weaves together the elements of his own life in short lines of vernacular to create complex images of life in his native Louisiana and the jungles of Vietnam. From his humble beginnings as the son of a carpenter, Komunyakaa has traveled far to become a scholar, professor, and prize-winning poet. In 1994, he claimed the Pulitzer Prize and the $50,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his Neon . . .

“Painting Abstraction: new elements in abstract painting” by Bob Nickas.

Featured Artist: Michelle Ross

She is well known for her contemporary abstract paintings, which “[traverse] the history of abstraction, design, decoration and the love of language” (here). Her work has been likened to Mondrian, Hans Hoffman, Giorgio Morandi, Agnes Martin, Mary Heilman, and Robert Mangold. Ryan Pierce has stated that “Ross’ paintings are firmly grounded in the tropes and traditions of modernism,” they are “refreshingly free of the gimmicks that crowd a lot of abstraction these days,” and they “link the classical and the modern with grace and reverence, leaving plenty of open space for whatever happens next” (from a 2007 review on PORT).

More images of her recent work can be seen on the Elizabeth Leach Gallery website.

“Painting Abstraction: new elements in abstract painting” by Bob Nickas.

For this week’s library pick, we have selected a title that showcases many of Michelle Ross’ contemporaries and other artists pushing the limits of abstract painting. The book is Painting Abstraction: new elements in abstract painting by Bob Nickas.

After a prefatory essay on the “persistence of abstraction,” the book is broken up into six parts: “hybrid pictures,” “Rhythm and Opticality,” “Color and Structure,” “Found/Eccentric Abstraction,” “Form, Space, and Scale,” and “the Act of Painting.” About a dozen or more artists have been selected for each section and a short text describes how each particularly addresses some issue related to that section’s theme.

For example, Nickas asks “Is the hand of an artist more visible to us when drawing and line are central to her paintings?” (139). He then demonstrates how this question can be answered in the “affirmative” by a close investigation on the work of Allison Miller. Several large, full-color reproductions of her work follow in order to illustrate his point.

Painting Abstraction is an authoritative compilation that addresses the key issues in the field of abstract painting from the last five years and profiles 80 different contemporary abstract artists including Mark Grotjahn and Amy Sillman. Bob Nickas work is an excellent balance of research, critical analysis, and, what all great art books so often have: art, art, and more art.

Everyone dreams of finding that one priceless item hiding in the corners of a dust-ridden attic. One UK teacher recently experienced the joy of rescuing such a forgotten antique, all thanks to an old owl painting that turned out to be worth nearly a million dollars.

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"Reconstructed" new works by Michael WillettOpening Reception on Friday, Feb 27th from 5-9pmExhibition runs from Friday Feb. 27th - Saturday March 21st, with gallery hours on Saturday and Sunday from 12-4pm. 1305 Gallery is located at 1305 Main Street in OTR, Cincinnati About the artist:

This piece is the Dickey Betts guitar solos from “Statesboro Blues” performed at three-quarter speed to make it easier to learn. It is note-for-note off the Allman Brothers Band At Fillmore Live album. Information on obtaining the tab I wrote … Continue reading →

This piece is the Duane Allman guitar solos from “Black Hearted Woman” performed at three-quarter speed to make it easier to learn. It is note-for-note off the Allman Brothers Band 1969 self-titled album. Information on obtaining the tab I wrote … Continue reading →

I’m learning all of the songs from the 1969 self-titled Allman Brothers Band, and post the full and three-quarter speed demos to help you learn them. This piece is both the Duane Allman and the Dickey Betts guitar solos from … Continue reading →

I’m learning all of the songs from the 1969 self-titled Allman Brothers Band. This piece is the Dickey Betts guitar solo from “Don’t Want You No More” performed at three-quarter speed to make it easier to learn. Information on obtaining … Continue reading →

I’m learning all of the songs from the 1969 self-titled Allman Brothers Band. This piece is the Duane Allman guitar solos from “Don’t Want You No More” performed at three-quarter speed to make it easier to learn. Information on obtaining … Continue reading →